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Will History Remember Our Online Selves?

What is lost to history?

My elementary school-aged daughter recently brought home a geography project. They were to take the first letter of their name, and turn it into a map of an island.

A-shaped island, elementary geography lesson
Elementary school geography lesson

My first reaction was, of course, pride at a young child's art work. Her island looks like an interesting place to visit, with lots of green space, and only a few houses. Lots of open water, while still having a safer harbor and an inner lagoon. A zoo. And of course Snoopy, her current passion, has a place on the island.

Map skills in 2021?

Gradually, though, the lesson struck me as anachronistic. In our modern world, with satellites enabling GPS to know our place in geography within feet or inches, and with online apps that allow easy zoom scaling, rotation, satellite or street-level photos and more, why are they learning about compass roses and map legends? Are those still things that are important to know?

And if not, if these and other concepts of paper-based maps are no longer relevant, what have we lost?

You should know that I am a huge fan of paper maps. As a child, the atlas was one of my favorite books. Whenever I visit a national park, I buy at least one paper map, usually a topographical one, and study it endlessly to plan some hikes and camping trips.

So I am all in favor of her learning basic map-reading.

And I confessed that, when some teams were eliminated from Season 7 of the Canadian version of the Amazing Race TV show because they lacked basic map-reading skills, I mocked them openly.

Disappearing Artifacts

My daughter's project also reminded me of the old computer game Sim City, a city-builder game of urban planning and managing citizen needs and demands. Players were challenged to decide how to mix residential, commercial and industrial zoning, taxation, and other factors, to grow their cities in population and wealth. Commerce needs an airport, but it is a high source of pollution so where should it go to minimize its negative impacts on the population?

In the early 1990s I sank hundreds of hours of my spare time into that game. I especially loved island-based maps, or ones with prominent water features. I loved the added challenges posed by the more restricted amount of land available and the natural bottlenecks to flow of people and goods that the bridges between parts of the growing cities.

But as much as I might like to show my child those old Sim City maps I created and managed, they are gone. Long gone. Due entirely to evolving technology.

The version of the game I played was geared to much different computer hardware and software than the modern machine I am using today. But even if I could somehow find the necessary emulator and a disk image or other source of running code, there are other limitations. Like:

I saved my maps on 3.5-inch diskettes.

All diskettes and any diskette-reading hardware have long ago been purged from my house. I probably backed up the files to a CD-ROM before tossing them, so I might - MIGHT - still be able to find the files. But then what? What would read them today, 30 years later?

So, ironically, her short geography lesson, and the paper artifact it produced, could well outlive all my beautiful city creations that I spend hundreds of hours honing and perfecting.

CNN, 9/11 and Flash

The lost historical artifacts of my Sim City maps are pretty trivial, though. Other than a minor twinge of nostalgia and brief sense of loss, who really cares?

But the progress of technology is causing things of greater societal impact to also be lost.

The 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept 11th (9/11) passed recently. And some news outlets discovered that their archives were, well, less accessible than they might have expected.

CNN, for example, published an article admitting that, in the early aftermath of the attacks, a lot of their material was presented using Adobe Flash. But when Flash reached its end-of-life in 2020, much Flash-based content on the internet became inaccessible.

It will certainly make the work of future historians more challenging. The process of looking through old books and papers may still be possible, but some sources of then-contemporary information have turned to virtual dust.

Internet Archive

So I am heartened to discover that others have realized the same thing, decades before it occurred to me! And that they are doing something about it.

I have recently begun exploring the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine. It has been working for 25 years to attempt to preserve at least some of the history of our online world.

It is a not-for-profit endeavor that is well worth the time and support of anyone who cares about what is lost in our ever-evolving, ever-changing technological world.

Like me, now. All because of a child's geography lesson and hand-drawn paper map.





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